How to Build Futures Scenarios: 14 Key Questions
The questions we work through when building scenarios, and what a good answer looks like for each.
A futures scenario is a structured, internally consistent description of a plausible future operating environment, written to be used rather than admired. Scenario building is the process of constructing a small set of these futures - usually three or four - that differ from one another in ways that matter to a specific decision.
Most scenario sets that disappoint do so for one of two reasons. Either they are so cautious that they describe today with the dates changed, or they are so inventive that nobody can trace how the world got there from here. The fourteen questions below are how we test for both.
Three things to settle before we even start buildings the scenarios are:
How far out? Scenarios need a horizon long enough that the present cannot simply be extrapolated, and short enough that people still feel responsible for it. For most organisations that means somewhere between eight and fifteen years, and for infrastructure or policy work it can be considerably longer.
How many? Three or four. Two collapses into good and bad. Five or more produces a set nobody can hold in their head, which defeats the purpose.
Who is in the room? Scenarios built by a strategy team alone tend to reflect the assumptions of a strategy team. The people who will have to act in these futures should have a hand in building them.
Let’s now visit the different questions that are key to make the best scenarios possible, divided into four sections:
Foundations: What the scenarios rest on
Inside the world: Building futures that hold together
Consequences: What each future impacts
Stress test: Before it moves into decisions
Foundations: What the scenarios rest on
1. What assumptions are we making, and which are we willing to break?
Assumptions are load-bearing, and most of them are unspoken. A useful exercise is to write down ten things everyone in the room believes will still be true in a decade, then build at least one scenario in which three of them are false. If all your scenarios share the same unstated assumption, you have found a blind spot rather than a foundation.
2. What are the drivers of change behind each scenario?
Drivers describe causation: the forces pushing the system in a direction. Separate those that are largely predetermined over your horizon - demographic structure, installed infrastructure, legislation already passed - from those that remain open. The open ones do the work of pulling the scenarios apart from each other. A scenario without visible drivers is a mood rather than a future.
3. Which of our biases shaped this set?
Ask it out loud, and ask it early. The recurring tells are easy to spot once you look for them: every scenario turns out to be a technology story, the pessimistic scenario is a caricature nobody in the room believes, and the future looks suspiciously like the sector's own trade press. Naming these takes ten minutes and changes what gets written.
Inside the world: building futures that hold together
4. What happened to make this future possible?
Write the history backwards, from the scenario to today. If the path contains a leap nobody can narrate, the scenario will be dismissed the first time it meets a sceptical executive. The backstory is also where you find the early indicators worth monitoring once the project is over.
5. What does this world feel like, and what does it value?
The cultural, social and political temper of a future shapes behaviour inside it. What is admired here, what is embarrassing, what would a public figure have to apologise for? A scenario with an economy and a technology base but no values is difficult to inhabit, and inhabiting it is the point of the exercise.
6. What are the PESTEL implications?
Political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal. Use PESTEL (or another tool like Megatrends) as a sweep rather than a structure: a check that no dimension has been left at today's settings without anyone noticing. In our experience most sets over-develop the technological and economic dimensions and leave the legal and environmental ones standing around as scenery.
7. What is the essence of this scenario in one sentence?
If you cannot state the central dynamic in a sentence, you have a collection of trends rather than a scenario. The test is whether a colleague who was not in the room can repeat it back a week later. That sentence is what will travel through the organisation, so it is worth an hour of argument.
8. What are the second- and third-order effects?
First-order effects are the ones everyone list. The useful material sits downstream: what people do in response, and what those responses do in turn. Abundant cheap energy is a first-order effect. What abundant cheap energy does to where people choose to live, and to what becomes worth manufacturing locally, is where the strategy questions actually appear.
Consequences: What each future impacts
9. What trade-offs does this world force?
Every plausible future gives something up. A scenario in which everything improves is a wish, and one in which everything degrades is a warning. Both are less useful than a future that is better along some dimensions and worse along others, because that is the shape real futures take.
10. What does each scenario mean for different stakeholders?
Run each future past the specific groups the organisation depends on: customers, employees, regulators, suppliers, partners, the communities it operates in. The same world reads differently depending on where you are standing in it, and those differences are usually where the strategic implications are hiding.
11. Who gains and who loses?
A sharper version of the stakeholder question, and one that makes people uncomfortable, which is part of its value. Winners and losers show you where the political friction will sit, and political friction is often what decides whether a future arrives at all, or arrives late, or arrives somewhere else first.
Stress test: before it leaves the room
12. Is each scenario internally and externally consistent?
Internal consistency means the elements can coexist. External consistency means the scenario does not contradict something well established about how the world works. The usual failure is a detail carried over from the present that could not survive in the world being described - a business model, a regulation, a job title that the scenario has already made impossible.
13. How is each scenario different from the others, and from today?
Scenarios should be structurally or qualitatively different, rather than the same world dialled up and down at three intensities. We also avoid a status quo scenario. Continuation is itself an assumption that deserves challenging, and when it appears in the set it tends to become the one everybody ends up planning for anyway.
14. What will make this scenario memorable?
Artefacts: a name, an image, a headline from that world, an object, a day in the life of someone living there. Scenarios that get used are the ones people can recall under pressure, months after the workshop, when a decision is on the table and the report is closed. The artefact is what survives.
From scenarios to decisions
Answering these fourteen questions gives you a set of futures that will hold up in a room. Turning them into a decision is a separate piece of work.
That work usually means running the current strategy through each scenario in turn and sorting what you find into three piles: moves that pay off in every future, moves that only pay off in one, and commitments that break in more than one. It also means leaving with a short list of indicators drawn from the backstories in question 4, so that you can tell over the following years which way the world is drifting.
Scenarios that stop at the narrative get admired but scenarios that get tested against strategy get used.
Frequently asked questions
How many scenarios should you build? Three or four is a good rule of thumb for keeping a certain structure. Two tends to collapse into an optimistic and a pessimistic version of the same world, and five or more produces a set that nobody can hold in mind well enough to use.
What is the difference between a scenario and a forecast? A forecast estimates what is most likely to happen. A scenario describes one plausible way the world could work, and is built alongside others precisely because the likely outcome is unknowable. Scenarios are tools for testing decisions under uncertainty rather than predictions.
How far into the future should scenarios look? Far enough that straight-line extrapolation from today stops being credible, which for most organisations means eight to fifteen years. Infrastructure, energy and public policy work often justifies twenty-five years or more.
Do you need a 2x2 matrix to build scenarios? No. The two-axis matrix is one useful way to generate a differentiated set, and it is popular because it is quick to teach. Archetype-based approaches, backcasting from a preferred future, and inductive scenario building all produce valid sets, and the fourteen questions apply regardless of which you use.
What makes a scenario plausible? A traceable path from the present, internal consistency between its elements, and drivers that are already observable today even if their outcome is not settled. Plausibility is about whether the route can be narrated, rather than whether the destination feels comfortable.
Originally published on Medium in February 2023 and substantially revised in September 2026.
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There are dozens of foresight tools available. Which one do you reach for, and when?
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